Stop Treating People Like Shit And They’ll Start Giving A Fuck

If Generation X ,Y, and Z act lazy, aimless, apathetic, disrespectful, and not giving a shit, it’s because the Baby Boomers treated them like shit their entire lives. From the moment a child is born in the West they’re automatically considered a second-class citizen relative to adults by law. Children don’t have the same rights and freedoms as adults do. Putting aside the argument of whether this is philosophically justifiable, consider the psychological impact that has on children. During their formative years of development, when children are forming the perception of reality they’ll use through the rest of their lives, they take it for granted that they’re second-class citizens. Children are even legally allowed to be beaten during the formative years of their life. Children who are hit enough tend to develop battered person syndrome, and somewhere in the world right now there’s a group of kids having a bragging competition over whose parents or siblings beat them the worst.

When children go to school they’re forced to address adults with higher titles than them as if they were in a military cult, and nonconformity is punished swiftly and harshly. And each school has its own rule book that imposes a whole new level of rules on children and is effectively law to the students; school rulebooks are effectively comparable to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), and like the UCMJ, school rulebooks tend to have a lot of absurd, random, pointless rules that serve no productive use other than to get the people who live under them used to following rules and fearing punishment for nonconformity.

For the first eighteen years of their lives, children endure a brutal, haphazard gauntlet of tests and assignments at school that judges their worth as a human being, and when they don’t perform well they get smacked on the nose hard, and the worse they do the harder they get smacked. Children who do endure the beatings and pass the tests are told that when they graduate they’ll get go to an even harder school with harsher punishments and more tempting distractions, but they’ll have to go into half a lifetime of debt in order to do it, and once they graduate they’ll get to go sit in an office cubicle that is effectively a sensory deprivation chamber where they’ll endure another lifetime of belittling, absurd rules, minimal pay, absolutely zero company loyalty, constant tests to determine their worth as a human being and indefinite punishment for nonconformity. In order to get one of these jobs, they’ll have to sign a contract that waives a significant amount of their legal rights away effectively putting them under a private version of the UCMJ.

The Baby Boomers understand all this. They’ve seen Office Space. They know there’s at least a little truth to Fight Club. They’ve read Dilbert. They know what kind of a life their children have in store for them. They know the best most of them have to look forward to is being a faceless servant in a droll, stressful, ungrateful, disrespectful, lying, cheating corporate world. Generation X won’t get a pension because the Baby Boomers destroyed all the unions, and Generation X won’t get social security because the Baby Boomers will have bankrupted that long before Generation X retires. The Baby Boomers have systematically destroyed any hope of their children achieving the American Dream, and yet Baby Boomers act surprised when the younger generation doesn’t give a shit.

The Baby Boomers went out of their way to raise their children in a series of Skinner Boxes that rigorously conditioned them to not give a shit and then set them up to spend the rest of their lives in an environment that doesn’t give a shit about them. That’s why young people don’t give a shit.

Stop treating them like shit and they’ll start giving a fuck. And stop accusing young people of having an undeserved sense of entitlement when they complain about being treated like an inferior species.

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